Bringing Business Sense to the IT World...

Okay, I have to come clean, and do it as publicly as I did with my mistake. A couple of days ago in my My Favorite Rant posting, I accused some web sites of manipulating my system to add their site to my Favorites list in Internet Explorer. Shannon Hager commented that it was probably my own mistake, but I was certain I hadn't installed anything, and I have a good popup blocker so it wasn't from clicking on something like that.

It happened to me again tonight, and fortunately this time I was chatting with Damian Maclennan and had him try out the site that did it to me. He said it didn't do anything to him, and then he casually asks, “Are you sure you didn't accidentally hit CTRL-D?” I got rather pale, and then a bit red-faced, and finally had to laugh at myself. Sure enough, that's what I did. I read several blogs through Newsgator and as I am cruising through the posts (especially the long series that Scoble puts out) I keep my fingers poised above Ctrl-D to delete them once I've read them. Well, occasionally I'll click through to a link inside one of the posts, and when I'm done reading, by habit, I hit Ctrl-D while on the web site, forgetting to switch back to the post message. And guess what Ctrl-D is the shortcut for in Internet Explorer? “Add this page to my Favorites“, apparently.

So, thank you Damian for helping me out. And sorry if I alarmed anyone other than myself.